Duncan Forbes Website design

Background

Duncan Forbes is a highly respected musician, DJ and producer and I was delighted when he asked me to design both a new identity for him as well as his website (and various Albums & EPs – some released recently – some still in the pipeline 🙂 Watch this space).

I have known Duncan for years, and he has been a trailblazer in many guises in the world of music, most famously as 1/2 of the electronic music duo: Spooky (alongside Charlie May) as well as being involved with DJ’s such as Sasha (co-writing, producing and co-producing a couple of Sasha’s hugely successful albums, singles and EPs).

Duncan’s musical pedigree starts in the early 1990s but continues very successfully to this day and beyond!

The design solution

Duncan had a number of target market’s in mind when he briefed me. Firstly, as mentioned, he’s got a huge back-catalogue of music. Some of it unreleased, some available only digitally, and a whole lot to be forthcoming in a variety of formats.

The basis of my design is what I’d call a “Brutalist” web design aesthetic. There’s lots of information, so it needed a fully thought through grid structure, and needed to be scalable as new material is added. It also needed to be able to pull in music and video streaming from all sorts of other websites such as YouTube, Bandcamp, Apple Music, Spotify … etc to separate pages.

I wanted for the site to almost look “under-designed” – almost like the way the web was a few years ago – but plainly with a design ethos appropriate to now – mostly typographically based as I knew there would be no problem with the visuals of albums and videos to populate the site.

Teaming up with a fantastic developer I hope what we’ve delivered ticks all the boxes.